The All Spin Zone Archives

Friday, July 29, 2011

Hello everyone. We want to announce that this site along with allspinzone.com will be up and rolling within the next few weeks. My name is Rick Glaser, and Sean Callahan is a partner of mine. We are bloggers that want to have a legitimate platform to share our thoughts.

We will be making a similar announcement on the other site, and we want you to be aware that article from now and into the future are not necessarily the thoughts of Richard Blair (although we hope he agrees with most of them!).

The site is going to be fairly quiet, and we will occasionally create a new post when it seems necessary. We are however, swamped with multiple projects out there. If you have an idea, or thought you want to share let us know!

There's still a war going on in Iraq. I know, I know, that's sooooo 2004. It's still a quagmire, though. You just don't hear too much about it much on this side of the Atlantic ocean because journo's have gotten the hint - if you ain't an embed, you could be dead.

So, here's a few top stories from today:

A mass hostage taking was reported yesterday in the town of Madain. The situation is apparently very fluid and confusing, particularly when the only available information is coming out of the Green Zone in Baghdad. The Associated Press stenographer in Baghdad stated that "Sunni militants were holding dozens of Shiite Muslims hostage and threatening to kill them..."; Al Jazeera says "a senior Shia official in Baghdad said up to 150 hostages were being held, including women and children..."; AFP is reporting "Sunni militants had seized up to 80 hostages and threatened to kill them unless all Shiites left". And apparently, a rescue operation has now been undertaken - which is apparently equally as confusing - is it Iraq police or U.S. forces that are conducting the mission? Pick your news source; take your chances.

What else has been happening? Oh, there was a riot in the prison at Camp Bucca after a detainee was apparently murdered. Several detainees escaped in the subsequent confusion; most were apparently recaptured. Seven Iraqis, including three policemen, were killed in an explosion at a restaurant in the town of Baquba, north of Baghdad...

Yep. Just another weekend in paradise. Oh, and those elections that took place back in January? There still isn't a functional government in Iraq, nearly three months after the elections.

Let's tie all of this up with a quick observation. A common thread running through nearly every report coming out of Iraq these days is that Iraqi "forces" (whatever they are) are responding to events. For example, in the sketchy reports on the three U.S. soldiers being killed in Ramadi:

...Seven servicemen were also wounded in the attack, three of them seriously, the military said in a statement. The attackers were believed to have fled into a nearby mosque. But when Iraqi security forces searched it, they found no insurgents.

Again, this is not an exception - nearly all of the news articles linked in this post have the same flavor when describing military responses to the event. What this is telling me is two things: U.S. casualties are down because soldiers are venturing less and less beyond the operational wall of fortified compounds, and relying on Iraqi first responders to chase the bad guys after a firefight. Second, the focus of press releases from the Green Zone are subtly changing to support the U.S. exit strategy - a major reduction of U.S. forces if U.S. casualties decrease and Iraqi security forces take over.